Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

Also, she suddenly dimly remembered someone called Tim Dashwood and odd details of a party she had gone to at his flat when she was a teenager: a plastic armchair pocked with cigarette burns, the suspect slickness of a greasy carpet under bare dancing feet, men with ponytails and slow-burning smiles who brought her and Helly drinks in plastic cups and didn’t bother even to learn their names. Like good little girls they swallowed and smoked everything that was put in front of them. The slow black ink mushroom-clouding in her mind came back to her, a fearful sensation of cold deep water slipping past, tugging the ground out from under her. All sorts of things could have happened to them — did happen to them — at those parties. She splashed out of the water and ran along the shoreline, staggering with the pain in her feet, shouting for Rose.

A high sheer stone wall came down into the water, too high for Rose to have climbed. Clare ran back up the beach alongside it, her breath coming jaggedly in sobs, stopping to peer into a hollow culvert that pierced the wall, wide enough for a child to crawl into: it was dark and foul and stank inside, with nameless black shapes half submerged in an oily black puddle, but no Rose. Clare became convinced again that she was being dangerously distracted from the real disaster, which was happening somewhere else, and she ran back down to the sea.

* * *

DAVID FOUND ROSE. She was quite unhurt and only thirty yards from where they had been standing and shouting, hidden from them by a grassy bluff. Clare made him show her the place afterward, at the back of the beach where a wet trickle that might have been a stream and might have been sewage emerged from a big concrete pipe set into an earth bank: Rose had been dabbling her feet where the water spilled over the lip of the pipe. She might possibly have been contemplating crawling up into the pipe, and possibly if it had rained (as it proceeded to do shortly after she was found) there might have been a rush of water off the land. But these dangers were too remote to count, or even to produce any retrospective jolt of imagination at a horror narrowly skirted; the only one hurt was Clare, who had cut her foot on something in the water.

David looked funny — improbable — holding a pink naked baby, balancing her as he picked his way down the beach, concentrating warily; Rose clung on with her arms round his neck. Clare had known all the time they were looking for Rose that if anything bad — anything sickeningly terrible — had happened, she would have never seen either of them again, David or Helly. There would have been a few hours of unspeakable practicalities with doctors and police and then they would have got out of it as soon as they decently could and driven back to London in their special Citroen that rose up on its wheels when you started it, and she would never ever in the remainder of her ruined life have been able to forgive them their association with that day. But now they were all reprieved; now she could like these friends again and smile at them. David was pleased with himself for finding Rose and tickled her awkwardly on the cheek, like a man who has not had practice at such things; she was still clinging to him as he handed her over, and Clare up close felt gratefully his friendly heat. Now she would be able to tell Bram that they had lost Rose and it would only mean an ordinary manageable hitch in the day; he would not be able to see through it to any deep dereliction, any dangerous absence of mind.

Helly put her cardigan around Clare’s shoulders, as the rain came pattering in dark spots on the stones, and tried to help her get Rose dressed, pulling tight socks on the wet feet, T-shirt on the twisting little body.

— You’re a naughty naughty girl, said Clare. You mustn’t take your clothes off, and you mustn’t wander away. Mummy was seriously frightened.

Helly looked abashed at what the moment had unleashed in Clare, the excess of reaction. It was excessive, Clare supposed: all that shrieking and thrashing about in the water, and the cut foot, which was bleeding now into her shoe. But she felt rather recklessly as if she’d showed Helly something, something she couldn’t know about, being childless.

* * *

CLARE SAT WITH her knees drawn up under her chin on her big unmade brass bed, opposite Helly cross-legged at the pillow end. She had bathed her cut with antiseptic and checked that her tetanus injection was still up to date (Bram kept meticulous records of these things). Her foot was aching. David had taken Coco and Lily out for a drive in his car, “to leave the girls to talk,” as he put it; Rose was asleep in her cot.

— So what’s he like? Clare asked.

— He’s nice, said Helly. Nicer probably than you’d think. He can seem a bit full of himself.

— I like him better than the last one.

A little involuntary spasm of pain and regret twisted Helly’s expression.

— Everyone but me could see it. But David’s much more steady, don’t you think?

Clare thought of him finding Rose. Oh, yes, she said. He seems kind. And sensible.

— I know he shows off a bit.

— Not in the least, Clare protested stoutly. He’s just exuberant. He knows how to enjoy himself.

— Oh, yes. He certainly knows that.

Helly thoughtfully closed her teeth on the cuff of her shirtsleeve and pulled at it, not meeting Clare’s eyes, sharing some joke with herself. Bram probably thought it was just a sensible shirt; Clare had recognized something expensive and perfect of its kind, all the better for being casual and crumpled.

— Meaning? Clare stiffened.

— Oh, you know.… Do you remember Moments of Beauty?

This was private jargon from a game they had played when they were teenagers: winding pop videos and films backward and forward to isolate the “moment of beauty” for their favorite male stars, the summation of what melted and undid them, some grin, some sleepy inadvertent glance, some lazy look of sexual appraisal. They had even tried for a while to isolate their own (female) moments of beauty in the mirror, so as to work on them; they gave up when their faces were beginning to freeze into perpetual self-consciousness.

— Well?

— David’s very good, sexually. You couldn’t really know him — I mean, what’s so appealing about him — without sort of knowing that. It’s his Moment.

Clare braced herself against the end of the bed. She felt caught out in the very scene of her decent connubial satisfactions: the duvet cover they sat on was faded and flowery and its fasteners were missing, so that an innards of gray duvet spilled out of one end. One of Rose’s teddy bears lay between their pillows with an air of baleful occupation; and for some reason she was visited by a memory of Bram calling out to her in the bathroom not to run the tap while she was cleaning her teeth because it wasted water.

— I see, she said.

— We do all kinds of things I never thought I’d do.

— Oh? Such as?

— Well, mirrors.

— You mean mirrors on the ceiling and all that kind of thing?

— And cameras.

— Oh, God, Helly, that’s awful.

— No, really it’s not. Helly laughed.

— But it’s so cold! I just don’t think that would give me any pleasure, thinking about it and setting about it in that deliberate kind of way.

— You’d be surprised.

— Isn’t it supposed to just happen spontaneously? Isn’t there something wrong if you have to plan for it? It seems unnatural.

— He naturally likes women, Helly said. You’d think you can take that for granted — I mean, under the circumstances — but believe me, I’m beginning to realize lots of men don’t like women, whatever they say.… Really, he likes them, it’s special, he has this look.…